I love hearing increasingly tortured euphemisms for death, murder and suicide because people don't want to get flagged by bots looking for advertiser-unfriendly content
Something dystopian about being trapped in a system that runs on mass death but expects you to talk about death like you're a character in a children's cartoon
You're not allowed to be aware of the spectacle. It's a crime. Dropping your mask of passive acceptance to fall to your knees and scream "The spectacle! The spectacle!~ it's all the spectacle!" in the middle of hte streets is illegal because it's bad for quarterly profits
Tiktok isn't an app for kids, i don't want to be ageist - it's for all ages and everyone can have fun on there. But the way tiktoker's talk on tiktok and other platforms with their cutesy little euphemisms for violence and sex does make me think every time "Ah, they're used to the kiddie app", because it's making grown adults be afraid to talk about adult topics.
This is just the fault of censorship and not the app or the users, but it is literally sanitized kiddie language and feels very out of place and hard to take seriously on websites that don't have that censorship.
The filters and algos and censorship rules are not public. All this shit "unalived" 'grippy socks vacation", is people trying to intuit what is an isn't allowed in an environment where htey have no meaningful feedback at all. "It's against our community guidelines". No one knows what the guidelines are. No one knows what does or does not violate them. No one knows if hte decision is made by a human or a machine.
The thought process isn't dissimilar to magic - People are doing ritualized actions to stave off the attention of their evil, hateful gods. if they make the sign of hte evil eye, if they say their prayers before bed, if they don't say "suicide" then the evil dopamine god won't de-list, de-monetize, or ban them.
When they started doing behaviorialism research on animals, there was this one thing that stuck in my mind, they found ut that, if they just gave pigeons food at random times, like pigeons in cages, the pigeons would seemingly start to think that whatever it was they were doing when the food appeared caused the food to appear. So very quickly they'd end up with pigeons doing these little dance routines, because the pigeon had built up an association between what it was doing and the appearance of food. The pigeon didn't know what hte fuck was happening, but it was trying to make sense of and control it's situations.
All these tortured neologisms, they're the same thing. people are trying to talk, just talk, about important shit in theirlives and all these vast, opaque, inhuman regimes of censorship and punishment are pressing down on them. But they don't know what hte rules are, the companies that have seized control of all mediums of public communication won't tell them, will lie to them, so they're trying to figure it out as individuals who either don't understand science or don't have the resources needed to interogate the system usinmg scienetific methods.
It's all fucked. There's a metaphorical existentialist shaking you by the collar and screaming "DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE THE ABSURDITY OF A UNIVERSE THAT IS BOTH INDIFFERENT AND CRUEL?!?!?!?!
Every genuine Gen Z linguistic invention is a word filter workaround. Nothing but mundane words that computer scientists can't filter for fear of filtering far larger numbers of mundane and innocent posts and significantly harming revenue for internet platforms, only to watch the kids select a new mundane word to describe a dick
It's either filter workarounds or it's been widely popularizing existing terms that used to be more regional or strictly associated with black or hip-hop culture. Like cap, fam, simp, etc
Which is pretty normal, isn't it? A lot of slang from the 80s was just reappropriated southern California surfer lingo.
No that one was motivated by cruelty. 4chan got it from a typo in someone's memorial Myspace page after they killed themselves. It's not a euphemism, it's a direct mockery of suffering and death.
I unironically like the term "unalive". I use it when I wanna be casual and whimsical in my misery. My language is a tad different when I'm holed up in my job's bathroom looking up that ol' hotline.
I don't have an issue with new slang, I do have an issue with people modifying the way they speak and write because of corporate content moderation and internalising those restrictions
I forget the name right now, it's like casual geography or something who does animal fact youtube stuff and his are pretty good, especially because it's applied to nature. Hearing what a young gazelle needs to do not to end up with their face on a t shirt or whatnot is pretty funny.
I'm not saying using colourful euphemisms for death isn't funny, I love wordplay. It's just depressing when people start doing it subconsciously because of shitty algorithms that don't even work because people will indeed just sidestep them by being creative
He's a fun exception and shitty algorithm is probably a part of why but you could get there just by being funny too. I'm generally anti-euphemistic language as a common use, harsh terms are needed to describe harsh subjects.